Enhance Your Operations with Sales Process Automation Tools for Logistics

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hi this is artem with f1 group and in this video i would like to show you our scheduler assistant works it's a non-technical demo and also a very simple implementation of the scheduler assistant why does a scheduler need an assistant well this goes back to how trucks are utilized by logistics companies our client has a fleet of vehicles of course it is a goal to have those vehicles on the road and transporting cargo fully loaded 100 of the time but unfortunately this is not the reality for any of the truckers out there so it's always an ongoing struggle to fill the available trucks first of all have them on the road and secondly achieve the full truck load so imagine that our company a has recurring customers ongoing orders that take up to 85 percent of their available capacity and the remaining 50 at any point in time they have to allocate on the spot basis so the scheduler sits there in the office of the logistics company and they are working with the freight exchanges we have three specific examples here careernet timocom and trans eu that are popular in germany however there is a bunch of various alternatives out there and many of those are original solutions so the scheduler goes onto those freight exchanges and looks for orders that match available vehicles that they can see from telematics solutions or fleet management solutions such as web fleet and then they use internal tools such as ptv to calculate routes and prepare bids for those open orders to hopefully win some orders in the market and finally scheduler uses communication tools it's writing emails whatsapp or skype to communicate with the customers that they find on those freight exchanges so let us have a look at the apps that the scheduler is working with so webfleet here is a solution that shows us which of our vehicles are currently available we can recognize that by those green dots right here and as a scheduler it is our job to find orders for those vehicles so let's start with the first one it's parked here in permasense in germany so let us copy that address and go to careernet which is a local freight exchange let's apply a filter to see only those orders that are in the say 50 kilometer vicinity of that vehicle and that match the vehicle type that we have here which is 7.5 ton truck so we run a search and that comes back empty so that tells us that on this exchange we're not going to find anything for that truck so we have to go on to another exchange and have a look here about this one so the second vehicle returns a bunch of results and we have to look at each of those results and see if it makes sense for us to bid for that order so this one it's in the fourth of june which is two days away from now so it's too far away second one is also on the fourth it's the seventh so it's all pretty far in the future unfortunately nothing for us here okay so third one third one actually has an order that is to be picked up today but it has to be delivered in two days for 230 kilometers that's a bit of a waiting time okay it's all too far away in the future and again for uh we have to loop through the various exchanges now and timocom is actually a larger one but i don't have the access right now to show you uh how we'd go about that but again you are going through a bunch of orders here and on this little map and seeing enough if any of those orders actually make sense for your vehicle so let's give it a go with the last one here to hopefully find something that works for us doesn't look too good to be honest no it is all not promising at all so unfortunately i just spent like five minutes uh and looked through this exchange here and haven't found anything if i did find an order that would make sense for me i would have to check it against a series of criteria so can i take this order based on weight so can it fit into my truck based on volume based on length and based on the type of cargo that is being transported if it's all a fit then i would need to calculate whether the distance to be traveled here actually justifies the expense of driving my truck to the loading point and i would use a root calculating solution there and ptv or google maps in this case so for example to calculate whether my vehicle here is acceptable distance away from the opening here is what i have to do so run this check i see that it's a 79 kilometer a distance to travel for a 230 kilometer order so that makes zero sense so this again eliminates an order for me so we've spent several minutes now going through that and you realize that it's really just a waste of time because i haven't found anything and if i did find something then i would be faced with a question do i spend more time looking perhaps there is a better order out there that i could take or should i just bid for this one and if the customer accepts my bid then i'm bound to fulfill that order so a lot of time invested and if you want to achieve a better result you have to put in even more time so let us have a look at what this workflow looks like when using a scheduler assistant in this particular implementation the bot is triggered by an email that we're sending so here we go let me send an email to the bot's email address with fill current capacity in the email subject out it goes and now basically we can do something else we can call a customer or we can go take a coffee or call a driver until we get the response back from our bot now let us have a look at the order details that we get here as a result of our bot's work and this is entirely configurable it can be sent to you as an email or it can be posted to your intranet or whatever this is very flexible so we have the vehicle details we have the bid estimate and the contribution estimate so this is really uh where the value added has taken place so the bot in the background has worked through a bunch of various factors including the weight of the cargo the volume the distance to be traveled um the time that it takes to fulfill the order the road dolls but also the idle cost so expensive is it to drive our truck to pick up the order in the first place and if the driver has to wait for any extended periods of time either pick up the order or offload it this is all calculated ing to predefined formula that's can be different for any business and then there are all the supporting details to that order so that the scheduler can pick up the phone and get in touch with the customer bid for that order and that process can be supported by the scheduler as well so for example we can configure it to show a it says submit a bid we click on that link as a scheduler and then for example a pre-written email pops out to the contact details that are indicated in that order on the freight exchange we can then have a final screen through that email check that everything makes sense make sure that the vehicle is actually available and then send it off so this long process of going through various exchanges looking at various orders calculating and then discarding your results when they don't make sense this is entirely automated here so the scheduler can actually focus on thinking about orders that make sense about communicating with customers actually negotiating with the customers because um you know if we see that this has to be picked up very soon then probably it's an express order uh which the customer might potentially be willing to pay up for so again increased efficiency better use of scheduler's time etc etc but all what this translates into is more revenue for the logistics company so let's have a look at what's happening under the hood as we were waiting for that email to come back from the ball what was actually going on in there so here you see the graphical interface off the bot it's low code so you can push the buckets here you can open them like this you can go in there and define whatever you want to achieve there without actually writing any typical code so it's very easy to handle we start with the trigger so the bot is listening to its email inbox and waiting for an email with a specific subject line header so when we wrote in their field current capacity it recognizes what we want to do and then initiates a sequence of steps so getting exchange orders getting vehicle availability and running the matching algorithm all are executed consequently in each of the steps a modular approach is used so first of all a taskbot is initiated that gets the orders from careernet then we get the orders from timocom then we get the vehicle availability through the api of web fleet then we match those entries and get any supporting details that we need to calculate their profitability and finally we put the output in an email so this is what happens there in the background as we're waiting for that email to come back now let us run the bot to give you a feeling for what it actually looks like when it's triggered the only step that you'll actually be able to see on the screen here is getting the orders from careernet because this is the only step that's actually being done through the user interface in other words when we can avoid mimicking human actions to achieve the results that the bot needs to achieve we do that and we use the so-called apis or application programming interfaces that let the bot speak directly to the applications that are being automated and it's just less error prone and if something changes in the interface that's not affected however if apis are not available for one reason or another either the provider doesn't um offer them such as in career net's case or for example when the vendor doesn't let you use their apis for some reason it's not a problem the bot can always work with the same user interface that a human would otherwise work with so let's go ahead and start the bot so you see it looping through hundreds of orders here on this particular exchange now it's doing the work in the background looping through the exchanges and other programs that can be connected through the apis and we will be getting the email from the bot shortly with the new results so there we go it took the bot about 30 seconds to get and analyze all the data and to prepare the recommendations and we're actually limiting the number of recommendations here to three by pretty strict selection criteria but uh we can could have gotten much more so when we started the bot the first thing you saw was that was being deployed to the local machine let me explain to you what that means all the development and management of the bots is done in the control room in the cloud however the bot itself is run on a separate machine so that can be a virtual machine it can be a physical machine in the customer's environment or it can actually be the laptop of the schedulers the important thing is the customer can choose where that computing machine is located so the data that's been exchanged with the freight exchanges here and with the internal system is under the control of the client it's in their system so the only thing that's leaving this environment is this signal to the control room to launch the board and the actual code of the bot itself however all the credentials all the passwords and all the data first of all is securely stored in the credentials vault and encrypted and secondly can be exchanged directly between the customers machine and those applications so we've seen how a scheduler at a logistics company can optimize their manual processes their repetitive processes and their strenuous processes by putting them in an algorithm and having a robot run that algorithm in the background that massively increases productivity that makes the job of a scheduler less stressful and at the end of the day what this means for the company is more truck utilization and more revenue so it's really no brainer to start automating some of the processes that can be automated and not only is the goal to increase efficiency but in my view most importantly it unlocks new approaches to doing things so why is it that we have to look at each individual vehicle when we can look at all our vehicles out there and we can look at all the orders out there and find the best possible match within a matter of just a couple of minutes if that's possible then why don't we take a truck that's currently on the road at 80 capacity and use that same robot to find an order that's on its way and with a light detour it can be picked up and increase that utilization perhaps to 95 percent you know if it's a small it's a small order typically you wouldn't bother picking it up but if it's enroute anyway and it can be found automatically without any additional effort and even if it makes i don't know 50 euros for the company why not go for it if that's possible then shall we buy more trucks if that's possible does it unlock growth for us that's possible can we train our schedulers a different way can we encourage teamwork can we provide better service to our customers so i'm really fascinated by the kinds of opportunities and the kinds of different ways of thinking that are unlocked by introducing automation intelligent automation into the mix as an executive i see it really as another tool in my toolbox that can be used in addition to my employees and in addition to my id systems to unlock new ways of thinking new ways of serving customers and new ways of increasing profitability and growing thank you for watching